Cultural sensitivity, Please !

Just a while ago I watched something disturbing in TV and now can’t stop myself bloging about it. It was some scenes from a reality program ‘big brother’ in which a bollywood actress “shilpa shetyy” is a part of.

Being born with sliver spoon in mouth and coming from a very dependent atmosphere, now she obviously finds it hard to adjust to the western way of life. I am not least bit bothered about the fact that a rich Indian movie star is now treated in an ordinary way. But, it is indeed disturbing to see the way one being ill-treated and harassed because of some social and cultural differences.

First of all, it ain’t easy to adjust from the eastern way of life to the western way all alone with no prior experience and if this is the way people gets treated, it only adds fuel to their misery. Being moved from east to the west, I can clearly understand some of the sentiments and the glitches of adjusting to a new way of life. But, lucky me.. I was surrounded by lots of nice people who made it easy for me.

Like any self-respecting Indian living abroad, I felt offended seeing the clips. Yes, it’s hard or rather impossible to generalise people as a whole, especially a section of the society comprising of more than a billion people. But even with in India, it’s not impossible to find prejudice against whites and other sections of the society and I find absolutely no point in some people protesting against it in the streets back home. Speaking up is extremely important but isn’t it also good to do an introspection before pointing the fingers at someone else.

Anyways, racism is a menace and I am happy to see all the media publicity these incidences are getting. At-least, it might help to bring out the seriousness of the issue. In an ideal world, respect for the culture should be a two way thing but the ground reality is not even close to anything ideal. Welcome to the real world, where not every second person is culturally sensitive. Sad, but true.